Senior Software Engineer, Tech Foundations

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community You Will Join:

Airbnb’s Service Mesh team sits within Network Platform and is accountable for the infrastructure that makes all service-to-service communication secure, reliable, and observable. You’ll work on a high-impact team that owns the designing, building and operating the critical systems that connect all Airbnb bank-end services, covering service discovery, load balancing, access control, traffic failover, and routing for thousands of applications.

Our team also cares deeply about culture. A happy, healthy team is a primary focus for us. We get stuff done - but are also supportive, honest, and we aim to have fun.

The Difference You Will Make:

As a member of the service mesh team, you will be working with talented engineers on cutting edge technologies of cloud native network stack. You will contribute to the key infrastructure components that connect all Airbnb users and services across the globe. You will have the chance to define and influence large infrastructure initiatives such as global traffic load balancing and disaster recovery, next-gen service mesh, cross-region gateways and edge security etc.

Airbnb is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) end-user community, and we work closely with the open source community (e.g. k8s, istio) and peer companies to tackle cloud native engineering challenges at scale. You will also have the chance to make an impact on the industry and open source communities.

A Typical Day:

• Define and deliver the roadmap for mesh capabilities (routing, security, policy, resilience, multi-region failover).
• Set and track SLOs/SLAs for availability and performance; drive data-informed improvements.
• Build and mentor a strong engineering team; establish engineering excellence, code health, and operational rigor.
• Align with Security, Edge/Traffic, Compute, and Developer Platform on cross-cutting initiatives and standards.
• Mature incident management, post-incident learning, change management, and safe rollout practices.
• Plan capacity and investments to meet growth while optimizing efficiency and cost.

Your Expertise:

• 5+ years of relevant software development industry experience in a fast paced, high growth tech environment.
• Experience running large scale networking systems and software